Berlin tests first ticket-free

Munich/Berlin, Feb 15, 2005 Later this month, Berlin will become the first German city to start using ticket-free "mobile-phone parking". For a trial period of one year, the Berlin districts Mitte, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf and Tempelhof-Schoneberg will be trying out an alternative to the parking meter designed to make parking more convenient for the user. There'll be no need to make your way to the ticket machine, and no need to search for change. You can park as long as you like, and you won't have to pay until you leave, when you will be charged for every three minutes that you've parked. The Berlin local governments will benefit as well, as monitoring car parks will be easier and more money will flow into the city coffers. Siemens Business Services will be operating the service in cooperation with Mobile Parking GmbH and T-Mobile.

This is how it works: drivers register their mobile-phone number, their car registration number and their bank details on the internet under www.handy-parken.de. They then receive an individual permit by post, which they stick on the inside of the windscreen. And that's all there is to it.

They then simply ring an 0800 free-phone number with the mobile phone that they've registered, and receive prompt confirmation by call-back. When they've finished parking, they repeat the process with a second 0800 free-phone number. Alternatively, they can send an SMS to the 0800 number - simply using "S" for start and "E" for end. They will then receive a confirmation SMS.

As a result, drivers no longer have to depend on parking machines and car-parking tickets, parking times can be calculated accurately to within three minutes, and there's no need to worry about extending the parking time. At the same time, there's no risk of getting a "parking ticket" because you've exceeded the time that you've paid for.

You simply pay at the end of the month by direct debit. And it goes without saying that drivers will still be able to use the familiar car-parking tickets and parking meters as well as the new mobile-phone solution.

Checks are carried out as follows. The inspector stands in front of the parked vehicle, enters the permit details with the encoded vehicle registration number by camera mobile phone (Siemens SX1), transmits the encoded data via GPRS to the Siemens Business Services data center and, a few seconds later, receives a message back on his or her mobile phone confirming whether the driver of the vehicle has registered.

The new service may also pay its way for Berlin City's finances, because, in future, the entire process - including the sale of tickets, monitoring, and any parking fines that may be levied - can be dealt with electronically, and the amounts deducted can be posted straight to the SAP system or other accounting systems being used by the local government bodies.

There will no longer be any need to list the summonses for parking offences or the amounts taken at ticket machines and parking meters. Up to now, these have had to be submitted manually to the city's accounting department. In the long run, fewer ticket machines will have to be set up and maintained - and payment practice among drivers will be improved.

In Vienna and ten other Austrian cities, Siemens Business Services is already operating a mobile-parking solution which is regularly used by more than 50,000 people. Siemens Business Services and T-Mobile carried out the test project through Mobile Parking GmbH, in close cooperation with the Berlin Senate Administration for Urban Development and the various district offices. The project is subsidized by the EU as part of the CIVITAS initiative.

In general, payments by mobile phone are booming. Experts like Arthur D. Little expect that, in three years, mobile-phone users throughout the world will be paying at least ten times as much by mobile phone as they did in 2003. This would mean an increase in mobile-payment sales from 3.2 billion dollars in 2003 to 37.1 billion in 2008. According to Arthur D. Little, there will be a particularly sharp increase in the use of the mobile phone to purchase car-parking and travel tickets.

After Editing or Managing over 50 print publications primarily in the role of a Magazine Doctor, Mike embraced the internet full-time in 1995 and became a "start-up all-rounder" – quite a few start-ups later, he founded Gizmag in 2002. Now he can write again. All articles by Mike Hanlon